Open Thread
March 2010 archive
Mar 31 2010
Late Night Karaoke
Mar 31 2010
Mixed Feelings Open Thread
Mar 31 2010
Vatican Uses Torture Defense in Abuse Scandal
The Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI are in trouble. As more information comes to light about how the church, under Vatican orders, shielded priests that molested children, more lawsuits are being filed against them. In particular is a lawsuit filed in Kentucky seeking class-action status against the Vatican itself.
VATICAN CITY – Dragged deeper than ever into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defense that it hopes will shield the pope from a lawsuit in Kentucky seeking to have him answer attorneys’ questions under oath.
The response by the Vatican is, to say the least, predictable:
Court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.
But, buried in the story, is that the Vatican also plans to use the “torture” defense.
“If Pope Benedict XVI is ordered to testify by a U.S. court, foreign courts could feel empowered to order discovery against the president of the United States regarding, for example, such issues as CIA renditions,” Lena wrote in a 2008 brief.
Mar 31 2010
UN Donor Conference on Haiti
Tomorrow in NYC the UN Donors’ Conference for Haiti which will discuss the current and future needs of Haiti after the devastating Earthquake on January 12.
Tonight on Frontline they will air the documentary The World is Coming to an End
On Jan. 12, 2010, one of the most devastating earthquakes in recorded history leveled the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Those responsible for handling the catastrophe, including the Haitian government and the United Nations, were among the victims. FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith bears witness to the scale of the disaster and takes viewers on a searing and intimate journey into the camps, hospitals and broken neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. Featuring never-before-seen footage of the moments after the earthquake and interviews with top officials from Port-au-Prince to Washington, The Quake ultimately asks, how will the world respond?
The crisis for the Haitian people is still happening and getting worse with the rain. I don’t want to think of the catastrophe that awaits with the hurricane season but I must, so must the world.
Mar 31 2010
Obama’s progressive creds.
Booman and Bowers like what they see.
On “progressive” health care reform from the horse’s mouth:
I think that’s unfortunate because when you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said, you know, this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican Governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts.
On progressive war-making in the “good war:”
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.
On progressive economics (Neil Barofsky):
…even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.
On progressive civil liberties (via the civil liberties extremist, Glenn Greenwald):
Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.
These are mere data points, but utterly representative data points. I could go on all day. The point is that Obama has put health care revenue streams above health care, continues the meaningless bloody slog in oily regions of the world, has completely failed to reform the vastly corrupt financial system at taxpayer expense, and walked all over human rights and civil liberty concerns to protect the culpable ruling elites.
To excuse any of this as “pragmatic” indicates a belief that good policy is NOT good politics, and the latter reigns supreme. Such a belief system is not reality-based in the long-term.
Mar 31 2010
Have you read A People’s History of the United States?
I’ve been reading A People’s History of the United States over the past year or so, in between everything else I’ve been reading. Since it’s spring break for me, I’ve been getting through a lot of it, and there’s definitely a reason it’s so popular. It’s one of those books that can seriously change the way you think. Just read this excerpt (yeah, it’s long – go check out the book from a library if you don’t want to read it online!) to see what I mean. This passage affected me a lot.
http://www.historyisaweapon.co…
I’d also suggest reading more about the Wobblies (IWW) if you’re interested. Very interesting organization, and Zinn writes a lot about them in this book.
Mar 31 2010
Meta: Left Blogs
I have deeper thoughts, but sometimes my shallower ones will do.
The question is-
- Which blogs do you consider left?
I’d like your reasoning and encourage you to provide a link, but neither is mandatory.
Mar 31 2010
Time to stop pretending
New Health Care Law a Republican Plan That Should Make Insurance Companies Proud
By: Jon Walker Tuesday March 30, 2010 2:22 pm
This new law at its heart is a pro-private health insurance, pro-big business Republican bill. It is not liberal or progressive, and it would be hard to justify even calling the law “centrist” because it lacks very popular elements like a public option and drug re-importation-reforms wanted by the broad “center” of the country.
It is nearly identical to previous Republican bills and laws. It is strikingly similar to a plan from the Heritage Foundation. It almost exactly follows the same proposal put forward over a year ago by the health insurance industry itself. After it passed, the drug companies spent big on ads thanking Democrats for passing this massive giveaway to their industry.
The law is a completely wasteful and poorly designed piece of corporate welfare. It is nothing for progressives to be proud of. If you want to argue that we should have supported it because the rampant corruption in our Congress and the fact that a huge number of senators are wholly owned by the health care industry means that this wasteful, pro-corporate bill was the only way to get some help to some people in need, I can at least accept the honesty of that argument. But let’s all stop pretending this was some great victory over the health care industry and for progressive policy.
Mar 31 2010
Afternoon Edition
Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Top Stories |
1 Ireland pours billions more into ‘shocking’ banks
by Andrew Bushe, AFP
1 hr 1 min ago
| DUBLIN (AFP) – Ireland pumped in billions of extra euros to prop up its troubled banking system Tuesday as its finance minister warned his “worst fears have been surpassed” about how recklessly bankers had behaved.
Brian Lenihan told a bad-tempered session of parliament that the state was buying 81 billion euros (109 billion dollars) of toxic assets from failing lenders and injecting an extra 8.3 billion euros into Anglo Irish Bank. Although he gave no exact figures, he added the state will likely take a majority share in Allied Irish Bank — currently 25 percent state-owned — but remain a minority shareholder in Bank of Ireland, where it has a 16 percent stake. |
Mar 30 2010
Tortured Detainee Zubaydah, Used As Lab Rat by Our Govt
There isn’t much I can add to this. Just go read it.
Abu Zubaydah’s Drawings by emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler, Monday, March 29, 2010
Marcy Wheeler at FDL, who has established that the Bush administration had the Yoo/Bybee “permission” memos were written after the fact to legitimize the use of torture, quotes a new Jason Leopold story at Truthout.org about Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.
Torture Diaries, Drawings, and the Special Prosecutor 3/29/2010
While the CIA claims to have destroyed the tapes of the torture experiments conducted on Abu Zubaydah, his attorney, Brent Mickum, says
“…. he learned that the special prosecutor had obtained drawings during the course of his probe that Mickum believed were Zubaydah’s. In addition to the diaries, Mickum had previously sought from the Justice Department drawings Zubaydah made while in CIA custody. But the Justice Department told Mickum they could not locate the drawings.
“When I met with John Durham (note: the US Attorney and Special Prosecutor from Connecticut, who is investigating the CIA’s destruction of the tapes) I discovered he had drawings, which, based on my review I believed were my client’s,” Mickum said. “The drawings were ultimately produced to us in late 2009.”
The Justice Department would not discuss the drawings, diaries, or other issues related to Zubaydah’s case.
Mickum said in lieu of the torture tapes, the drawings Zubaydah made contain the best description of the torture techniques CIA interrogators used against Zubaydah while he was being held at the agency’s black site prison facilities “
According to Jason Leopold, his sources at the CIA, FBI, DOD, NSA, State Dept, DOJ, and former govt. officials, are only speaking on the condition of anonymity, but claiming that the CIA made the tapes to study Zubaydah’s reactions to the “techniques” used on him. When a particular type of torture made him break down completely, anything less severe was considered “legal” and therefore was okayed to be classified as legal interrogation techniques in the Yoo/Bybee memos. The tapes were subsequently destroyed.
One of Leopold’s sources referred to him (A.Z.) as an experiment and a “guinea pig.”
The tapes were destroyed. The personal diaries untranslated. The self portraits…. conveniently misplaced.